‘Snow White’ on Prozac

Five hours of makeup have transformed Sigourney Weaver, the stunning 6-foot heroine of three (and soon to be four) “Alien” films into a snaggle-toothed, hunchbacked, gnarled hag. Layers of finely sculpted dermaplast, the latest thing in fake skin, give her a bald pate with a fringe of long gray hair, while dentures flush out her teeth and her ears would make Alfred E. Neuman jealous.

“I’m not disfigured,” Weaver protests as a reporter does a double take. “I’d say I’m quite attractive for a woman of 125.”

She pulls out a snapshot of Sam Neill standing next to her in her witch garb and looking distinctly unamused.

“It’s such a pleasure to run up and scare people between takes,” she says. “[Sam] hated it. I’d come around and I’d pet him. It made him so uncomfortable. I told him, ‘Oh, dearie, you make me want to be 50 again.”

Weaver has ventured across the Atlantic and into makeup to star as Claudia, the evil stepmother in “The Grimm Brothers’ Snow White,” one of three current live-action film projects whose titles--if not their actual content--will conjure memories of Disney animated classics. Martin Landau stars as Gepetto in “The Adventures of Pinocchio,” due out in July from New Line Cinema, and Glenn Close stars as Cruella DeVil in “101 Dalmatians,” due from Disney in November. (Disney consulted with Interscope, the producer, on a few points on this “Snow White,” which bears little resemblance to its 1937 animated version, but is expected to pass on distributing it. If so, the film will be shopped elsewhere.)

One recent week, after several days’ shooting in a Gothic castle in the Czech Republic, the cameras were rolling on the mammoth sound stages of Barrandov Studios in Prague.

First it was the fiery, blood-spattered finale, in which Snow White (16-year-old Monica Keena) bashes her horribly disfigured nanny, Ilsa (Prague-based American Dale Wyatt), with a crossbow. Then came the poison apple scene.

“Kids and adults thinking of the original Disney classic won’t be the audience for us,” says producer Tom Engelman. “This film has a dark, twisted, subversive quality to it.”

Indeed, there’s no “Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work we go.” Snow White doesn’t talk to the sparrows; there isn’t even a real Prince Charming to come and carry her away. Instead, two louts, one a mother’s bland dream, the other a mother’s racy nightmare, battle for her very adult affections.

Nor is there a happy band of funny little fellows accompanying Snow White; instead Lily, as she’s called here, joins the Outcasts, a band of seven aesthetically challenged societal rejects who make their home in an abandoned abbey. With only one genuine dwarf, John Edward Allen, in their midst, the outcasts are disfigured, displeasing blackguards--including an excommunicated priest and a child molester.

And the new talking mirror is no harmless oracle. Here, it is a manipulative evil spirit given to Claudia by her late mother, a sorceress. Weaver plays both the face in the mirror and the three-dimensional stepmother (who occasionally dons the hag disguise).

“It’s not just a talking mirror,” Engelman says on the set, launching into a discourse on Bruno Bettelheim and Nietzsche and even providing photocopies of some of their writings. He developed the script from rereading the original Grimm Brothers tale, which has little in common with Disney’s cartoon.

Like a literature professor addressing a class of undergrads, Engelman speaks in rhetorical questions laying out theories he has been developing for more than three years: “What was it at its core that gave the tale its lasting power? The wicked stepmother, the blood, the snow, a girl cast out in the wild. Seven strange people find her. It’s really Freudian.

“What’s the metaphor of the mirror? In our film, you can see it as the [Freudian] id of this psychotic woman--or you can see it as supernatural. It’s magic that’s for a modern audience,” Engelman says.

“You play on what you know is the universal expectation of the tale. Through the audience’s familiarity with the tale, you can exploit their expectations of where the story turns, and play on those expectations, violate them,” says director Mike Cohn, a former film school professor at the University of Texas in Austin.

“Remember Bambi meets Godzilla? That’s what you can do to a familiar story,” adds Engelman, recalling the 1969 cartoon short where a massive Godzilla hoof squashes a peacefully grazing Bambi. In this case, it’s more like Walt Disney meets “Fatal Attraction,” and a return to the original, dark and evil fairy tale.

The Brothers Grimm didn’t invent the tale of Snow White; they were olden-day anthropologists, recording German folk tales. Engelman, who did considerable research on the subject, points out that the Snow White story exists in some form in nearly every society whose oral tradition has been studied--from Finland to sub-Saharan Africa. It is often a tale for adults, not children.

That complexity, in fact, is what attracted Weaver to her part.

Grabbing a few minutes’ break between takes, Weaver stubs out a cigarette and details the pleasures of playing the schizoid Claudia in a psycho-thriller about a beautiful woman who battles her stepdaughter for the man they both love, the father, played by Neill. In this version, a miscarriage pushes her over the brink.

“But you know it’s not just biological. It happened because of this young girl, and the mirror brings out all Claudia’s worst fears, because she’s an impeccable woman--she’s French, she’s very beautiful, she’s very seductive and she loves her husband very much. When she feels she loses him to this girl, she just goes berserk,” Weaver says.

Describing Claudia’s evil doings with relish, Weaver grows disturbingly fond of her character.

“Claudia’s just a great character. She’s diabolic. The wicked part of her is just delicious to play. This apple scene is really my favorite scene in the movie, because it has everything there--love, food, death, sex--it’s great fun. This role gives me a chance to do all that stuff I used to do in the theater that no one would conceivably cast me in now that I’ve done ‘Alien’ and ‘Ghostbusters’ and all that.”

Weaver says she covered herself in cheap wine to prepare for the part of the crone, and then rewrote the script to refine the drama.

“This is the scene everyone is waiting for. The original script is about me giving her the apple and convincing her to eat it,” Weaver says. Instead, as the hag eats her own apple, a hungry Snow White, lost in the woods, is teased into asking for an apple herself.

“Sigourney knows this character inside out and we listen to that,” Engelman says.

Over on the second unit, Gil Bellows, a handsome Vancouver-born stage actor, is rehearsing his final scene, a chase through the castle. As Will, a dashing outcast with a cross branded on his cheek, he rescues Snow White and she, of course, falls in love with him.

A few moments later, huge fans blow dozens of leaves through the set’s open windows whipping up bits of sandwich the extras have left lying around. Spears and axes fly as a band of Czech extras, possessed by a spell that Claudia has cast, chase Bellows through the castle.

A second-unit director yells, “Cut,” and hurries over with a palm-held VCR to director Cohn, still rehearsing Weaver in the apple scene across the stage.

Cohn, whose previous directing jobs included the straight-to-video films “Interceptor” and “When the Bough Breaks,” is getting a kick out of directing his first big-budget feature. “It’s very daunting to jump to a $30-million film, but ultimately it’s not that much different than a $1.5-million film--the heartbreaks of the shots you don’t get, the daily deadlines. It’s just a larger and more complex machine.”

The simple, bleak forms of the Gothic Era influence the designs. Production designer Gemma Jackson says she’s never even seen the Disney version: “I keep saying to myself I must get around to it.” Her sets were inspired by visits to gothic castles in France, England and Germany and the actual castles the film shoots in outside Prague.

Back on the set, with Weaver rehearsing again, the second unit halts, too, and visitors are shown to the canteen. Saying her goodbyes is 10-year-old Taryn Davis, a longhaired, wide-eyed bundle of energy who plays the young Snow White in the film’s opening scenes.

A fourth-grader, Davis is at the age when kids are still enchanted by Disney’s “Snow White,” hoping that Prince Charming will come rescue Snow White and they’ll all live happily ever after.

But Davis says she prefers “her” Snow White to Disney’s. “That one is sweet little cute Snow White, and nothing ever happens. This one is ugly and gruesome, and sometimes its pretty good. It’s bloody,” she says with a wicked grin.

This might shock some parents, but Bettelheim, a child psychiatrist, wrote that kids need to be exposed to the darker side of life:

“Many parents believe that only conscious reality or pleasant and wish-fulfilling images should be presented to the child . . . but such one-sided fare nourishes the mind in only a one-sided way, and real life is not all sunny.”

Back on the set, Weaver is now ready to let people watch the filming.

She is evil incarnate as she sits by a riverbank, maliciously striking up a conversation with Keena.

“I was young once. I had many boyfriends. Life is sweet when you’re young,” the old hag says, then asks Snow White about her boyfriend.

“He’s strong and he’s handsome,” answers Keena, taking a bite from the apple. She chokes and falls back, as Weaver scuttles over, cackling with delight.

Weaver says she won’t let her own 5-year-old daughter, Charlotte, see this film. She hasn’t even let Charlotte see “Ghostbusters.” “She’s very imaginative. . . . She was on the set last week and there were all these people walking around whom apparently I’d done awful things to. In my spare time, when I’m not killing Snow White, I go around brutalizing the servants and she said, ‘What happens in this story Mommy?’ and I said, ‘Well, Snow White has a happy ending and my character doesn’t really have a happy ending.’ She said, ‘Oh, Mommy, I want your character to have a happy ending, too.’ ”

When Keena comes off the set from the gory finale, she spares a few minutes to talk.

“I’m not really a killer,” Keena apologizes, wiping at blood stains on her flowing white gown. “I don’t mean to be. It’s just that I come into my house and all the servants have gone berserk and they’re trying to kill me. I didn’t want to kill [the nanny] Ilsa. She was my best friend. But she was attacking me.”

A 16-year-old high school junior, Keena started out at New York City’s High School of Performing Arts (the school that inspired the movie and TV series “Fame”), but when she was selected to play a bit part alongside Sandra Bullock in “While You Were Sleeping,” she had to switch to a private school that would let her study on the set. Apart from a few small stage roles in New York, she has had almost no formal training or experience, but landed the role after an audition, beating out some 200 other hopefuls. She manages to carry much ofthe film on her small shoulders.

“I started out wanting to be a plumber. I was a strange kid,” says Keena, whose long, black hair flows back from a tiny Botticellian face and a high, broad forehead.

“Monica’s amazing,” says Bellows, her Prince Charming. “She’s a talented, intelligent, funny, charming, sharp, sweet, beautiful, self-composed 16-year-old hip-hop hippie chick from Brooklyn. She’s 16 going on 25. There’s no baggage. She’s got all that fire from Brooklyn but she’s a classical actor. She understands and interprets the text.”

Keena herself has difficulty explaining her sudden success.

“When I’m walking around, I’m Monica, but whenever I’m on the set I just turn into Lily. I still can’t believe I’m here. It just seems like yesterday that I was writing out letters to all the agents . . . asking them to represent me and no one ever called me back.”

Keena says that as a kid she didn’t like the Disney “Snow White.” But this character is different--a strong, romantic young female.

“The last character I played was very delicate and fragile and I said, ‘Oh, I wish I could play a strong character in a period movie’ and then I read this and all my expectations were fulfilled.’ ”

The character’s family situation may be “pretty dysfunctional a lot of the time, but this Snow White’s pretty spunky, and she’s sensitive and she’s open to learn a lot of things just like anyone else growing up in the world. Just that this happens to be the 15th century. She’s very much like me in a lot of ways. I’m getting stronger every day just playing the part. I don’t think anyone who saw the Disney fairy tale could relate to Snow White because she seemed so flighty.”

How much of Cohn’s psychodrama will survive the cutting room is an open question. The scuttlebutt on the set is that the film may be just a bit too intellectual for a property with such a hot title and two well-known stars.

“The difference between us and ‘Pinocchio’ or ‘101 Dalmatians’ is that they are retelling very closely two cartoons in the same style and plot using a new puppet or a bunch of cute puppies,” Engelman says. “We are not basing our story on the cartoon. We are basing it on the folk tale that has never been seen on the screen before.”